Thinking about the other f word

There’s been a lot of interest in the f-word lately. Of course, I mean the seven-letter one. To wit, fascism.

According to Merriam Webster, it was the most searched word on the internet on election night in 2016. It came close to being the word of the year for 2016 but it was trumped, no pun intended, by “surreal.” In Feb. 2017, The Washington Post reported that fascism’s share of internet searches in the new year was already five times the level of 2015.

Last year, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who spent her early years in its shadow in Europe, published a book titled “Fascism: A Warning.”

It’s shown up in the news quite a bit lately.

No doubt the word gets kicked around inappropriately, often coming to define a fascist as anyone with whom one disagrees.

The word had a fairly innocent origin. During the Roman Republic, one of the more democratic governments in the ancient world, lictors or bodyguards of officials carried fasces, a bundle of rods tied around an axe blade as a symbol of legitimate authority.

The symbolism was powerful. A single rod could be easily broken, but not many joined together.

It survived as a non-fascist symbol long after the ancient world, showing up both in the reign of French King Louis XIV (1638-1715) and in the symbols of the French Revolution which overthrew his dynasty in the late 1700s. You can even find fasces behind the podium of the US House of Representatives, on the left and right and on the seal of the US Senate.

It acquired its modern connotations when adopted by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Mussolini was originally a socialist before embracing authoritarianism, militarism, imperialism and extreme nationalism after World War I.

At first, Mussolini was more opportunist than ideologue. His initial platform called for women’s suffrage and social programs including greater representation of workers. However, those ideals soon faded as he reached an accommodation with traditional economic elites and crushed independent workers’ organizations.

Eventually the term was applied to other movements, most of which didn’t gain power. One notable exception, of course, was Germany, which would far eclipse fascist Italy in terms of power while it lasted.

Fascist movements often begin as a variety of populism, which can take many forms, some benign. Michael Kazin defined populism as “a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class; view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic; and seek to mobilize the former against the latter.”

John B. Judis distinguished between the populism of the left and right. In his recent book “The Populist Explosion,” he suggested that:

“Leftwing populists champion the people against an elite or an establishment. Theirs is a vertical politics of the bottom and middle arrayed against the top. Rightwing populists champion the people against an elite that they accuse of coddling a third group, which can consist, for instance, of immigrants, Islamists, or African American militants.” Or some other group. You can pretty much fill in the blank.

(Side note: I’d personally prefer we retire the language of left and right when it comes to current politics. Those terms refer to which side supporters or opponents of the French monarchy sat on at the National Assembly in 1789, which isn’t exactly a burning issue these days.)

Still, one can have populism of the “right” without having fascism. And fascist movements that gain state power generally ditch the populist agenda as leaders reach understandings with conservative and business elites. The populist base of such movements generally get thrown under the proverbial bus. A classic example of this is Hitler’s 1934 purge of more radical Nazi supporters in what came to be known as “the night of the long knives.”

So what does the word mean mean these days? And does it matter?

One scholar who has researched the history exhaustively is Robert Paxton author of “The Anatomy of Fascism” (2004). He defined it as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

He saw the mobilizing passions of early stage fascism to also include the need for authority and “the closer integration of a purer community;” belief in superiority of the leader’s instinct over reason and logic; the beauty of violence and the will in pursuing the group’s aims; and the right of the chosen group to dominate others without restraint.

He saw the movement as including stages from their emergence to their establishment in the political system to gaining power to wielding it to a final stage of either radicalization or entropy. The good news is that while authoritarian regimes can last a long time, fascist ones don’t have much of a shelf life. So far.

Ever since fascist movements emerged in the first half of the 20th century, many Americans have asked themselves if it could happen here, a question that has been asked more frequently these days.

I think it’s possible but not inevitable. While this may be to be the closest this f-word has had to a moment in the sun in this country, I’m hoping it’s more of a flirtation than a long-term relationship.

Still, it might be good to recall the words of Pearl Buck, the only West Virginian (so far) to win the Nobel Prize for literature: “When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.”

(This appeared as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Unhappy anniversaries

I happened to notice, thanks to a cursory web scan, that today is the 100th anniversary of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip, which set off a chain of disastrous events that led to the First World War. To be fair to Princip, he probably didn't have the whole world war thing in mind when he did it, but that's the way history rocks it.

If there is one thing historians of the 20th century agree upon, it is that this war, a product of arrogance, ignorance and imperialism, was an unparalleled disaster that set in motion the other nasty events of the 20th century. It would be hard to imagine the rise of Nazism without the humiliating defeat of Germany and the punitive treaty that followed. I doubt that the Bolsheviks would have been able to achieve a monopoly of power without the near collapse of Russia the war brought about, which would have also meant no Stalinism.

Ironically, many of the people at the time who opposed the war, such as radicals and socialists, were marginalized and persecuted.

There's not much point in speculating on the "what if?" question. I think some kinds of imperialist/colonial wars were inevitable given the state of the world economy at the time. But it would be hard to imagine a worse course of events, the effects of which we are still feeling.

(Did you guys notice the elegant way in which I avoided ending that lest sentence with a preposition?)

A friend of mine in New Hampshire pointed out in this blog post that yesterday was also the 100th anniversary of the conviction of radical labor organizer and songwriter Joe Hill of the Industrial Workers of the World. Hill would have undoubted protested the war as well had he lived, but he was executed in Utah in 1915 on questionable murder charges.  Hill wrote some of the best and funniest labor songs ever written, which some disreputable rabble-rousers, myself included, know by heart.

Here's hoping for a better century to come, although I'm not inclined to bet the farm on it.

BAD COMPANY

Nazi troops rally at Nuremberg, courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabero has been musing lately about the ideas of the Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries. The series started Monday.

Of all the possible criticisms that can be directed at Jung--and there are a boatload--the most serious involve his alleged early sympathy for the Nazi movement. Controversy continues about this up to the present.

Politically, Jung was not the brightest crayon in the box. He was a conservative Swiss with considerable wealth, thanks to his marriage to the former Emma Rauschenbach, an heiress. He was hostile to leftist movements and ideas. Like many wealthy Germans of his day, he may have been sympathetic or at least ambivalent about the early Nazi movement. It was all for law and order, after all...

Psychoanalysis in its early days had a disproportionate number of Jewish adherents, which is why Freud valued their alliance before they broke off contact. After the break with Freud, Jung dabbled in what Sig considered to be the black swamp of occultism. Among the many currents of the latter were efforts to promote so-called "Aryan" spirituality, much of which was eventually embraced by the Nazis.

In some of his speculations, he seemed to imply that various "racial" groups had their own psychological makeup. He wrote some rather loopy things on happenings in Germany, such as his essay "Wotan," which seems to argue that the German people were under the possession of the archetype of the god of the same name from Teutonic mythology. Here's an essay which discusses Jung's tendency toward "proto-fascist thinking."

Jung also retained positions of leadership in the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy and the journal Zentralblatt fur Psychotherapie after these had fallen under Nazi influence. He later claimed that he did so in order to protect Jewish analysts and to keep the discipline of psychotherapy from being wiped out by the Nazis, who suspected its "Jewish" origins. These claims have been widely disputed.

There is an ironic twist to the story. After the US entered World War II, Jung was contacted by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a forerunner to the CIA. He was eventually dubbed "Agent 488" and provided opinions on psychological conditions in Nazi Germany.

Jung disputed allegations of Nazi sympathies in the postwar period, but permanent damage was done to his reputation.

At the very least, someone who wasn't able to spot the fact that Nazis were bad news early on does not deserve the status of oracle and font of wisdom.

ALL THAT GLITTERS ISN'T GOLD. This article discusses the first Gilded Age and the the one we're currently living through.

HUNGER. From the UK Independent, here's more on the growing global food crisis.

ONLY CONNECT. The US ranks 15th out of 30 developed countries in providing access to high speed Internet, as this EPI snapshot reports.

BINGO! I couldn't resist linking this article about how bingo suffers when smoking is banned. In El Cabrero's days as a volunteer firefighter, the most hazardous duty I ever did was working our bingo games. The smoke was so thick an air pack would have helped. Once when it was over I counted the non filtered cigarettes in one player's ashtray. I can't remember the exact number now but I think it was around 15 and the game lasted around three hours.

HAVE YOU HUGGED A BEE TODAY? Here's an item in praise of them.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

HISTORY LESSONS

The former Douglass High School in Huntington, WV, alma mater of Carter Woodson, "the father of Black History." He also served as principal there.

The theme of this week's Goat Rope has been Black History and its many connections with West Virginia. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Yesterday's post discussed the great African-American scholar, historian, and activist Carter G. Woodson, who had many connections with the Mountain State. It seems fitting to close this series with a couple of quotes from his classic The Mis-Education of the Negro:

When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand her or go yonder. He will find his "proper place" and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.

And

History shows that it does not matter who is in power...those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they did in the beginning.

Finally, it's only right to mention another African-American with West Virginia connections who made a mark on history.

The Rev. Leon Sullivan (1922-2001) was a native of Charleston and a graduate of Garnet High School and West Virginia State College. He also attended Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University, and served for a time as an assistant pastor under Adam Clayton Powell. He was the long-time minister of Philadelphia's Zion Baptist Church.

In 1971, he was the first African-American to be appointed to the board of General Motors and developed the "Sullivan principles," a code of conduct for corporations with operations in South Africa, an early challenge to the policies of apartheid. According to the West Virginia Encyclopedia, "in 1999 the United Nations adopted the "Global Sullivan Principles: as an international code of corporate conduct."

Sullivan also founded Opportunities Industrialization Centers, which provided jobs and training for disadvantaged people at many locations in the United States, African, Poland and the Philippines. A Nobel nominee, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991. A major street in his native city was renamed Leon Sullivan Way the year before he died.

RETHINKING TRADE. "Free" trade used to be a dogma among many economists, but Business Week reports that some are taking a closer look at the downsides:

Many ordinary Americans have long been suspicious of free trade, seeing it as a destroyer of good-paying jobs. American economists, though, have told a different story. For them, free trade has been the great unmitigated good, the force that drives a country to shed unproductive industries, focus on what it does best, and create new, higher-skilled jobs that offer better pay than those that are lost. This support of free trade by the academic Establishment is a big reason why Presidents, be they Democrat or Republican, have for years pursued a free-trade agenda. The experts they consult have always told them that free trade was the best route to ever higher living standards.

But something momentous is happening inside the church of free trade: Doubts are creeping in. We're not talking wholesale, dramatic repudiation of the theory. Economists are, however, noting that their ideas can't explain the disturbing stagnation in income that much of the middle class is experiencing. They also fear a protectionist backlash unless more is done to help those who are losing out. "Previously, you just had extremists making extravagant claims against trade," says Gary C. Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "Now there are broader questions being raised that would not have been asked 10 or 15 years ago."

(It gets better.)

THE HOUSING CRASH. Also from Business Week, some are predicting that home prices could drop by 25% or more. The article notes that

two-thirds of people who bought in the past year would owe more than their homes would be worth...

SPEAKING OF THE ECONOMY GOING SOUTH, here's Paul Krugman on the recession and its likely lingering effects.

CARBON FAST. Bishops of the Church of England are urging Christians to cut back on carbon consumption during the 40 day fast of Lent, which began Wednesday.

HOW HITLER SEDUCED GERMANY is the subject of this item from Der Spiegel.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED